ATI Physical Therapy strengthens team growth

The physical therapy provider migrated to Dayforce to attract and retain top talent in an increasingly competitive industry.

Driving through Bolingbrook, Illinois, you are likely to pass by multiple ATI Physical Therapy clinics. Walk into a clinic and you’ll be greeted by familiar staff and a welcoming feel – you’d never guess that they employ over 8,000 clinicians at 800 clinics across the United States.

For 22 years, ATI Physical Therapy has been providing the highest quality of care to its patients in a friendly and encouraging environment. Founded on the values of teamwork, communication, quality of care, and the friendly factor, ATI Physical Therapy has built an experience that is completely focused on its patients.

As a company that emphasizes patient focus, ATI Physical Therapy employs some of the most talented and dedicated clinicians in the industry.

“What separates us from the competition is our team members,” explains Evan Swidler, ATI’s Chief Human Resource Officer. “Their emotional investment, their drive to create great energy in the clinic, and their drive to satisfy every single patient's challenges is key to our success.”

ATI’s winning combination of focused care and talented clinicians enabled the company to expand very quickly, growing its workforce by nearly 30% over five years.

Staying competitive

Although ATI was growing rapidly, with a competitive industry comes the challenge of continuing to attract and retain top talent.

“One of the biggest challenges within the outpatient physical therapy world is clinicians. Simply put, there is greater demand from a patient standpoint than there are clinicians, and it is difficult to satisfy that demand,” said Swidler.

It was becoming clear to ATI that it needed to rethink its employee process – from recruiting to retention efforts – to ensure it could attract and retain top talent, and remain competitive within the industry.

“Some of the struggles that we've had in the past were just trying to keep track of all of our employees,” says Michelle Quillin, Senior Regional Director of clinic operations.

“We had so many redundant manual processes, and stacks of paper we were constantly pushing. It was pretty clear that we needed a new solution,” adds Christina Trainor, Senior HRIS Manager.

This sparked ATI Physical Therapy’s partnership with Ceridian.

The single solution

ATI Physical Therapy migrated to Dayforce in 2016, and hasn’t looked back since. By implementing a single solution to manage recruiting, onboarding, time, compensation, performance, and benefits, the company has been able to save time on administrative tasks and focus on what is truly important – treating patients.

“It's like night and day. The amount of redundant processes that were eliminated and time saved is truly amazing,” says Trainor.

Through the Dayforce MyMove process, ATI Physical Therapy was able to migrate its historical data from its legacy system to Dayforce quickly and easily. Once the company went live with Dayforce, it started to notice immediate improvements.

“One notable improvement was in our onboarding process. We used to have paper packets and were doing a lot of manual data collection and entry. After migrating to Dayforce, we saved around 800 hours a year in our recruiting and onboarding process,” explains Trainor.

Trainor also noted that since migrating to Dayforce, her team has saved over 900 hours in their payroll process, and over 200 hours in their administrative processes.

Reward and retain

Not only has ATI been able to save hours in manual and redundant processes, but with Dayforce, the company is able to ensure that it is hiring and retaining the best clinicians in the industry.

“The Compensation module helps us to stay competitive in a really competitive landscape,” says Swidler. “With 8,000 employees and growing, we need to mature our organization in terms of how we think about compensation. Dayforce helps us simplify how we calculate important numbers like incentives or salaries, and allows us to manage huge amounts of data across all of our employees in an organized, smart, and efficient way.”

From an operational standpoint, Dayforce has also helped ATI Physical Therapy to better communicate internally about compensation and performance data.

“Our migration to Dayforce has provided greater transparency both to our leadership team, as well as to our employees about what they do, how they perform, and how we connect rewards to what they do every single day,” says Swidler.

“I think visibility is the biggest improvement from senior leadership’s perspective – to have visibility into the budget and be able to see the effects of their decisions. We know we have better insights, and are compensating our employees accordingly.” adds Trainor.

Continued growth

Looking to the future, ATI Physical Therapy plans to continue partnering with Dayforce to manage its expanding workforce.

“I'm exceptionally proud of how ATI continues to operate, the partnerships we have, and the way that we have leveraged Dayforce to truly go deep with our employees. We engage them in a meaningful way, and create that memorable experience for every single employee, every single day. Ultimately, I think it really is about how our business evolves, and we believe that Dayforce continues to evolve with us,” says Swidler.

“ATI always strives to be the best, and to deliver the best to our customers,” adds Trainor. “I think Dayforce really shares a lot of those values and ideals. They listen to us, to our feedback, and it's really great. I'm really excited about our partnership, and what the future holds.”